Readers

My gran never understood the things she read.
Typhoid stopped her finishing her first year
of school and all she ever remembered of it
was a couple of verses from her alphabet book.
The milkman gave her lifts to school in his cart.
She was lucky, being thin and freckled
she didn’t catch his eye, unlike others
who, on the dirty tarp among the pails,
paid carriage with their young flesh.

Because she was better at baking delicious cakes
than reading, in nineteen forty three a German
officer spared her life, the smells of her kitchen
reminding him of his family home in Bavaria.
His mother had read him The Odyssey at bedtime.
As a little boy, he didn’t understand the hexameter,
but he carried Homer’s book with him all life long,
that is, until an illiterate Bolshevik burned it
in a far-off gulag, along with his bloodied uniform.

Although typhoid passed me by, and I’ve read
a few books since mastering my own alphabet,
in England, where I live, I am illiterate.
When I speak, a beach becomes a bitch,
keys a kiss, a sheet shit. Not that long ago,
when trying to say I can’t do a thing,
I would call myself a cunt.

Homer said: “Nothing on Earth is weaker
than humans.” Percentage-wise, our bodies
are mostly water, which could also make
some crazed Odysseus set sail inside us.